"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too."

- Voltaire (1694-1778)

Hmmm.

"Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again."

- Vincent Van Gogh

I am pretty good at making mistakes. I prefer to think of it as being preoccupied with more important things...an abstractionist's view of distraction. In reality though I think I am just clumsy. But, out of mistakes can come great things - Flubber for example.

If everything we accomplished was according to plan, it would be pretty boring. Granted I do feel a little peevish when I turn right in the car when I meant to go left - an action that happens more often than not, as I have an innate ability when given a fork in the road to go in the exact opposite direction than my goal. However, in the car Mary and I have long since titled such meanderings as "adventures" and now look forward to the accidental discoveries they undoubtedly yield. It is good now and then to get off the path. I am positive I am better for it.

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success...

... When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.
- Tennessee Williams

I have been working on a Renaissance-styled Triptych, called "Wolf at the Door". It is a heart piece to my Fairy-Tale series, and one of the more allegorical things I have produced. Based on the story of the three pigs, they are locked away safe and secure in a fortress, blithe in their separation from the wolf - but this wolf has a savvy they had not considered, he has found the key to the door. Meanwhile halo'd bluebirds flutter blithly overhead, busy building nests from sticks and twigs stolen from the battered remains of blown-in wood and straw houses in the side panels

I am as guilty as anyone to have trusted the safety of institutions. I have believed that if I support governance, it will shield me from things I don't want to see. We have been brainwashed to this effect from the day we were born, and as a society we believe that if we march forward clustered as an army, building a wall that seems formidable will turn back the wolf.

The real danger in this is that we haven't ask the right questions -

Abraham Lincoln wrote - "The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty."

When looking for safety, the greatest danger is entrusting ourselves to an institution that surrounds us like a fortress - and in doing so becoming complacent. Belief in the strength of the wall belies the fact that in doing so we have undermined the very liberty we thought we had ensured. By doing so, fat and happy and asleep tucked into soft beds we are easy prey to the wolf to whom we have practically handed the key.

And who is the wolf? He is in us as well.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun."

- Pablo Picasso

Okay, I admit I am a bit clumsy. I tend to leave spots anyplace I have been. Amazingly I realized today that there is a coffee spot on the carpet by my desk that I cannot figure out how it got there, since I just know I have not spilled. It has company, because there are bits of food and M&M's that have rolled under the desk and which constantly seem to elude the occasional vacuuming of the office's trusty cleaning crew. I have long since abandoned anything but a very busy tie pattern, and generally realize that a nice tie can disguise almost any lunch-stain on my shirt. I did spill water on my desk the other day, a mixed blessing since it required that I stop and sop it all up, but it did leave a nice clean surface - early for me since I generally do a once-a-year cleaning of my desk around New Year's.

I wish I could tie this all in to a treatise on great art; instead it ties me into a long line of eccentrics. Mark Twain was generally unkempt. Einstein. Schweitzer. Beethoven and Mozart. Pig-Pen. It isn't that I don't care - in fact anyone that knows me well would say quite the opposite. It is just that I am, out and out, clumsy. It is the "Mole" in me, I suppose - I would love to be tidy and organized and do a fair job of pretending to be so, but in reality, just like my hero Mole in The Wind in the Willows, I really quietly admire Rat, who has a quality to find organization in anything. Mary is a lot like Rattie - partly because she remembers anything and everything in vivid detail - so while there are times when I see a pile of magazines or papers on her desk, all it looks to me to be is a pile of papers...but to Mary it is a pile of Inspirations - bits and pieces to be harnessed together when the need arises into a creative brew. She inspires me daily, thinking in the abstract, and both of us challenge the other to stretch and grow. Thanks to our finding one another we have learned to look beyond the obvious; I now look past the spot lurking beneath my tie - it may irritate me, but then I remember that it was truly a fine cup of coffee.

Seeing a spot as a spot is what I know. When I see a spot of yellow I do give it a thought, a second look, a third. It may be a sunrise, a butterfly, a California Poppy, a taxi or a Golden Retriever. But it is never just a spot. That is what I have learned.